Road paving has been standard for over one-hundred years in order to accommodate automotive transportation requirements. Such paving procedures include earth movement and leveling, asphalt and bitumen introduction, asphalt leveling, and other steps. In essence, such a process requires the delivery of asphalt and like materials to specific road paving locations. Such materials are provided in proper form, namely as loose, but adhesive structures that can be placed at a specific location on a road paving site that can be spread and pressed into a finished continuous road.
Since road paving generally entails remote locations and continuous structures of significant lengths, such asphalt materials must be produced at a separate site and suitably transported as necessary. As such, contractors (and sub-contractors, as the case may be) must effectively estimate the amount of asphalt that is needed for pre-determined paving procedures in order to not only provide suitable amounts for proper coverage, but also to remain with a specific budget for the overall contract. Delivery trucks, such as dump trucks (referring to the capability of such a vehicle to have placed within its bed, haul, and then remove materials through raising its bed), are typically utilized for such asphalt transportation needs. The proper delivery, however, of these sticky materials, particularly as it pertains to the compacted nature thereof during transport, creates certain problems that have proven rather troublesome within this industry. For instance, the sheer weight of such asphalt materials, coupled with their necessarily elevated temperatures (to guarantee a certain degree of viscosity upon arrival at the paving location), causes, generally speaking, consequences of certain portions, particularly within the lower regions of the transported samples, to not only adhere together compactly, but also to stick to the target truck bed. More particularly, such asphalt adhesion occurs more readily in the “dog house” portion of the truck bed, most likely due to the hotter temperatures generated by the vehicle at that location, as well as the greater denseness of the materials themselves at that specific area of the bed. In any event, asphalt adhesion is noticeably more prominent and likely at such a location than other places in the target dump truck bed. This result has proven to cause significant problems for drivers and pavers alike. Such asphalt clusters may agglomerate to a great extent as to prevent, at least, an evenly flowing asphalt sample to move from the truck bed to the paving site. Any retained asphalt within the truck will thus either not be properly transported to the paving location (thus skewing the estimated asphalt amounts needed for the project) or will require removal in a forceful manner at the site. Such removed, clustered asphalt materials, however, are not of a suitable flow for introduction within the paving methods and/or the paving machinery. If the delivered asphalt is not of the proper consistency, the leveler, mixer, etc., may be compromised and damage to such machinery may readily occur. Additionally, retained asphalt residues could accumulate in the corners of a truck bed and effect the distribution to such an extent that an extended bed during a dumping operation could actually cause the truck to flip over.
Even if such clusters of asphalt are not removed at the paving site, the driver/operator must, at some point, act accordingly to remove such undesirable compacted materials to ensure proper weight distribution in his or her truck, proper weighing for future delivery jobs is permitted, and/or desired cleanliness of the truck is undertaken for other reasons. As well, fuel efficiency may be compromised when the bed is “empty” as a significant amount of residual asphalt may accumulate thereby increasing the overall weight of the truck. In any event, the removal of such agglomerated asphalt materials is not an easy task. If such materials do, in fact, impact the weight distribution of the vehicle, as one example, the driver/operator will need to stop his or her truck and properly tend to such a problem. If the problem occurs on a busy highway or road, such removal will be quite important to ensure the vehicle is properly controlled for safe driving. Necessarily cleaning the bed along a highway or road may jeopardize the safety of the driver/operator, not to mention the resultant clustered asphalt would require placement outside the truck bed. If such placement is made along a road or highway shoulder, it would be evident that such a resultant large, heavy, dense sample could create a further safety hazard at that location, as well.
Likewise, as alluded to above, such trucks typically include covers that are automated in such a fashion as to maneuver over the transported asphalt material sample within a target dump truck bed in order to prevent any appreciable amounts of asphalt from escaping the truck bed during transport. Without such a cover, the loose top level asphalt could become dislodged, etc., from the material sample and be inadvertently removed during such an activity prior to the needed delivery at the paving location. Such a cover, though, is typically made from a material that easily adheres to heated asphalt (and other live paving materials) such that upon removal from the asphalt sample, either the cover may become damaged (torn, etc.) or significant amounts of asphalt may be retained adhered to the cover, itself. In either case, the driver/operator would be out some asphalt as it remains on the cover, and/or the cover itself would require some degree of reconstruction to ensure future utilization will not be compromised.
As it is, basically, there exists a significant problem within the asphalt delivery industry due to the aforementioned issues. The lack of a straightforward and simple system to remedy these potential deficiencies provides the asphalt industry with difficulties in properly estimating amounts of asphalt that will actually be delivered properly and/or delivered in proper form, as well as potential damage to target truck beds, if not possibly injuries to drivers/operators in order to effectively remove such adhesive asphalt materials on demand.
It is evident that there exists a need to provide an effective manner of best ensuring proper delivery of properly estimated (and thus, expected) amounts of such materials to authorized paving locations. As well, there also exists a need to reduce any propensity of such important, but also potentially damaging, asphalt materials to compromise either truck safety or driver/operator safety. In the past, methods have included providing high-pressure cleaning subsequent to asphalt delivery (and at a location different from the paving site) in order to safely clean any clustered asphalt materials therefrom. Additionally, asphalt release agents have been developed to allow for easier removal of such materials, although the utilization of such agents have been limited to spray methods that are external of the truck itself. Otherwise, the utilization of hard-structure implements (shovels, picks, etc.) to clean such adhesive materials from truck beds have proven to be of great necessity to ensure the noted cleanliness/thorough delivery requests have been readily fulfilled (such implements may break up compacted materials such that introduction into a paving procedure may be accomplished at least more reliably than for a clustered sample). However, this option is fraught with potential problems, as well, particularly the need for the driver/operator to undertake significant physical exertion to complete such a task (and the potential for such a person to injure himself or herself either during such an activity or in the effort to actually maneuver himself or herself to the proper location within the truck bed). Likewise, the hard implements may also damage the truck bed to a degree that is quite undesirable, too.
Thus, there remains a significant problem that has yet to be properly addressed within the asphalt (and other like materials) delivery and transport industry. To date, the only remedies made available have focused on post-delivery activities as well as highly physical procedures that may or may not provide effective asphalt (or other material) removal for proper utilization within a paving process. The present invention thus overcomes each of these noted deficiencies.